Page 22 of His Darkest Desire

“We have a pact,” he said, voice low. “She swore by her true name.”

“Did you not do the same, all those years ago?” asked Flare, their light brightening to diminish Vex’s shadow.

Vex balled his fists, digging his claws into his palms. “It is not the same.”

Kinsley was his mate. It could not be the same, was never meant to be the same.

“It is, magus,” said Echo, their intensifying glow further dwindling the shadow.

Nostrils flaring with a harsh exhalation, Vex turned on his heel and resumed pacing. “Insolence at every turn, and in my own home. Am I not master here?”

The wisps fluttered behind him, making the shadows dance.

“You are, magus,” Echo and Flare replied in unison.

“And what have you to say, Shade?” Vex glared over his shoulder at the third wisp, who lingered behind their fellows.

“You have ever been master here,” Shade said in their haunting, gentle voice. “Master of illusion foremost. Thus, this one trusts that you have not fallen prey to your own deception.”

Vex halted. Echo and Flare brushed against his shoulders before they stopped, their light sputtering as they backed away. Fury swelled inside him, a firestorm with intensity enough to swallow the heavens and sear away the stars, but it was not a new fury. It had not been spawned by Shade, nor by Flare and Echo.

Neither was Kinsley Wynter Delaney its source.

This rage was much older than the human. It was older than this cottage, than this tree and the runic standing stones, older even than the pact he’d made with the fae queen all those centuries ago.

The pact that had destroyed his life and everything for which he’d worked, everything for which he’d hoped.

“Have I truly become no better than her?” he rasped.

Shade drifted closer. “When that question ceases to weigh upon you, magus, you will have your answer.”

Vex strode forward, ignoring the heat roiling beneath his skin and the flickers of magic flowing into him through the ground. What was done was done—Kinsley was bound to him. Her opinion of him mattered not.

He spread his wings, stretching the heavy limbs, before willing them to dissipate to nothingness. Cool air brushed his back through the slits in his tunic before the fabric settled. “Self-reflection aside, the situation remains unchanged. A child birthed of my seed is the only means by which to obtain our freedom, and as Kinsley guessed, we’ve a dearth of females. And now that I’ve instilled my lifeforce in her… There is no other way. She must conceive.”

And yet he could not force himself upon her. Even if she was no longer mortal, she was a human, little more than an insect to a being such as himself. But even had they not been bound, he could not have brought himself to cross that line. He could not do to Kinsley what the queen had done to him.

How infuriating to have the key in his hands but not the will to insert it in the lock.

“Centuries have passed, magus,” Echo said, “and in all this time, she is the first. Does that not signify something more meaningful?”

“lndeed,” Vex snapped. “It signifies that she is likely a fae-touched mortal with a realmswalker in her ancestry, who happened to tap into the latent power of her bloodline in her desperation.”

“Mayhap. Yet for her to cross into your realm at that moment, magus, out of all the places she might have been, might have gone…”

“You would imply her arrival is fated. I contend it is merely fortunate.”

“Are not fate and fortune oft intertwined?” asked Shade.

Vex clenched his teeth. “I’ve no desire to discuss this further.”

Fate had no hand in this. The pull he’d felt toward Kinsley, even before the wisps had informed him of her presence, had been the siren’s call of opportunity. He’d not been fated to take this human as his mate. He’d chosen her.

Those thoughts were oddly unsettling. They’d burrowed into his mind like insidious vermin, diseased, wrong. Somehow, he shoved aside the discomfort, the imbalance. Somehow, he silenced the part of himself that sought to refute his assertions.

But he could not deny the blossoming longing within him. He wanted to feel Kinsley’s smooth, soft skin under his hands. Wanted to breathe in air perfumed by her scent, to sink into her heat and stare into those entrancing periwinkle eyes, which held such unexpected depth.

Vex growled and stepped between a pair of roots to enter the stone circle. Magic thrummed all around him, a ceaseless rumbling caused by the meeting of four ley lines. “She is the vessel by which we will break this curse. She is our freedom. Naught more, naught less.”